I'M SO NOT EATING THAT

A lifelong fussy eater, this writer is unapologetic about saying, "No, thank you!"

The guy in the flanel shirt T really wanted me to eat his crab. "Have a claw!" he said, waving a steaming pincer in my face with tongs. 11No, thanks. I'm good. You go ahead," I said. I've suffered through this gastronomic showdown a million times, from Paris to Paducah, and it always ends the same way. I turn down food I don't want to eat. At best, I offend somebody. At worst, I make a new unfriend.

The crab pusher came at me last summer at a beach party in Gustavus, a little town on the fringes of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. Golden sun shining off the water. Friendly locals. Cans of beer on ice. Alaskan king crab pulled from the frigid Pacific just hours earlier, now boiling in a giant kettle. A bighearted fisherman pulling out my prize from the pot.

"Have a claw!"

After my third refusal, the cheery offer started to sound more like a prison warden's order to get back in line. The fisherman's expression said, I am the executor of your once-in-a-lifetime experience. So take the claw, and we'll both walk away happy.

Now here it was, the inevitable moment when the personal capital I'd accrued was about to get squandered with a single confession: "I don't eat crab." I don't care how much butter and garlic you soak it in, that crustacean spider's gnarled damper is not coming anywhere near my mouth.

"Don't eat crab?" His mariner eyes narrowed. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

Being a picky eater is more than a simple nuisance or an emasculating badge of shame (for someone like me, who has spent most of his adult life as an international traveller). It's a flaw that has ruined dinner parties, derailed relationships, and led to countless hungry nights.

Economy class, parasites, and crappy hotel pillows I can handle. What torments me is the prospect of being the honoured guest at some exotic native banquet and being presented with a sizzling plate of halibut ovaries. A short version of my "no, thanks, I'm good" food roster includes: all seafood, eggs, ham, tofu, milk, jellies, jams, cocktail sausages, game animals, most things pickled, all face parts, the entire organ oeuvre, chicken thighs and legs, anything in casings, cream of whatever, cheeses that float in jars of cloudy liquid, wheatgrass shots, anything associated with lactation or reptiles, bok choy, raisins (would it kill someone to make a plain oatmeal cookie?), the spines of romaine lettuce leaves, apricots, most plums, orange juice pulp, the last bite of a banana, green tomato sludge, and all mushrooms, which to me taste like soil and have the mouthfeel of sputum.

Then there are my maddening inconsistencies. Tomatoes are magnificent in pizza, edible as soup, terrible as a juice. Black beans are an impenetrable mystery; sometimes they're perfect, sometimes a pile of repulsive goop.

We hide ourselves well, but we are legion. There are so many fussy eaters in the world, in fact, that we're now being studied. The editors of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the bible of psychiatric reference books) have added a description of our plight to the 2013 edition's list of officially recognized pathologies.

"There will be a diagnosis called avoidant restrictive food intake disorder that will apply primarily to children but that theoretically could apply to adults;' says Marsha Marcus, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, who studied 10,000 self-described "Selective eaters:'

The biggest problem picky eaters face is peer pressure from people who think that if we 11just have a taste; everything will be fine. Oxtail soup in Italy. Beetroot in Australia. Plantains in Honduras. I've shocked the world by refusing them all, but the world keeps coming. The evangelists of squid ink, mayonnaise, and rhubarb have ruined so many nights for me that I've often pondered what motivates people to badger others ceaselessly into eating things they don't want to eat.

Marcus thinks it's a form of positive cultural exchange. 11Food sharing is often meant to cement and reinforce human connection and show caring and appreciation;' she says.

Jason Sheehan, a former chef and current food editor at Philadelphia magazine, suggests that food is how we literally and figuratively internalize national pride. "To [reject] a country's food is to say something nasty about its mothers and grandmothers, about the most dearly held traditions and tenderest moments"

In other words, politely decline someone's sweet potato bisque, and you're not just saying no. You're telling them their nana's moustache needs waxing.

On the plus side, some of the deepest friendships of my life have been sealed over the common denominator of food hate. Back in the '90s, I taught English as a second language at a college in Okayama, Japan. During my first month, I barely spoke to an aloof colleague named Glasser. One lunch hour, we discovered a mutual aversion to nori, that repulsive dried sea alga that the Japanese use to wrap, garnish, and flavour everything from rice to soup to spaghetti. Glasser and I have remained great buddies ever since. We still talk about foods we can't tolerate the way some guys talk about women or Xbox.

I grew up in southeast Alaska, dodging cedar-planked salmon flesh and venison chilli, my mother keeping me alive with a steady supply of grilled -cheese sandwiches and potato wedges. I thought moving to Japan would finally teach me how to eat fish. Instead it taught me how to say no.

I remember the night I declared that enough is enough. I was the guest of honour at a banquet thrown by the local Rotary Club. I'd been in Japan long enough to have endured a number of these miseries, forcing tortured smiles while compliantly swallowing chunks of rubbery sea carnage and glugging down pails of Asahi Super Dry beer to keep the eels and clams and tentacles from coming back up.

At the Rotary dinner, I'd vowed that my days as a human disposal were over and put down my chopsticks. Halfway through the meal, darkness spread over the face of affable Mori-san, the club president and a man for whom the term san-respected elder-was invented.

"Chakku-sensei, you do not eat," he said, gritting his teeth and sucking in air-an intensely polite display of Japanese opprobrium. "You do not like our sushi?" I straightened my back and laid the bad news on Mori-san and his klatch of drunken cronies. " Yes," I said." do not like your sushi. Not just your sushi. The whole country's sushi. Every country's sushi. I cannot stomach this food:' I was fed up at not being fed up. "This is no trouble;' he said warmly.

"You are American, so you must like beef. Would you like us to order you some beef?" I nearly kissed the man. Yes, beef would be good. Beef would be a miracle.

Then came the beef. A full plate of it, set in front of me like a Tokugawa treasure. Almost a kilo, sliced in perfect, thin little pieces. All of it as raw and bloody as open-heart surgery.

Mori-san showed me how to savour the meat, chewing it provocatively, then leaning back and letting the fleshy mulch slide down his throat. He was enjoying his revenge. I looked at the man. I looked at the sweaty circle of expectant faces around the room. I looked at the plate of shiny, wet meat. Then I reached for my beer.

Only the eternally crucified picky eater can fully appreciate the sense of deliverance that comes with working up the nerve to say "No, thank you" to a roomful of samurai Rotarians who have just dropped $300 on a plate of inedible meat in your honour.

The thing is, no matter how good you get at rejecting the culinary kindness of strangers, there are some people you really do wish you could please that crabber in Gustavus comes to mind. So invite us over for dinner; despite our phobic ways, we really are a sociable lot, and we may even make a valiant stab at your mango-encrusted fish casserole. But if the culinary going gets too tough for our tender sense of taste, please allow us both to maintain some dignity by graciously ignoring our gag reflex and accepting a simple but emphatic "No, thank you:'

By Chuck Thompson in "Reader's Digest", Indian english edition, vol. 55, n.5, May 2014, excerpts pp. 111-115. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.